Development solutions
API and systems integration
Integration work is where most operational cost hides. Orders re-keyed between systems, stock levels reconciled nightly, customer records maintained in two places, and a monthly close that depends on somebody’s spreadsheet. None of it appears as a line item, and all of it slows the business down.
Sardo Group designs and builds integration layers: APIs, event flows and synchronisation processes that connect commercial and operational systems with clear ownership of each data field, defined error handling and monitoring you can act on.
At a glance
- Engagement
- Phased delivery
- First release
- Typically 3 to 5 months
- Relevant sectors
- Enterprise & SaaSRetail & MarketplacesConsumer Electronics
Where this work begins
The situations that bring organisations here.
These are the problems a development engagement usually starts from, and what they cost if they are left alone.
Point-to-point connections
A history of direct links between systems, each maintained separately, breaking in ways nobody can trace.
Manual re-keying
The same order, customer or invoice entered into several systems, with errors found days later by the finance team.
No owner for the data
Two systems both think they own price, stock or customer status, and there is no agreed rule about which wins.
Silent failures
A failed sync that nobody notices until a customer or a report exposes it, with no log to establish what was lost.
What we develop
The systems we build.
Enterprise system integration
CRM, ERP, finance, warehouse, HR and commerce platforms connected with defined contracts and ownership per field.
API development
Public, partner or internal APIs designed for the consumers who will use them, with versioning, authentication and limits.
Data synchronisation
Batch, scheduled or event-driven synchronisation with idempotency, retries, dead-letter handling and reconciliation reporting.
Integration monitoring
Dashboards, alerting and an audit record so integration health is visible before the business notices a problem.
Capabilities
- Integration architecture and strategy
- REST and GraphQL API development
- Webhook and event-driven integration
- Middleware and orchestration services
- ETL and scheduled data synchronisation
- Third-party SaaS integrations
- Payment and banking integrations
- Logistics and carrier integrations
- Identity and single sign-on integration
- API gateway and rate limiting
- Error handling and reconciliation tooling
- Legacy system interfacing
Functionality and integrations
What the delivered system typically includes.
Scope is agreed against your operating requirement. This is the range from which a first release is defined.
Defined data ownership
An explicit rule per entity for which system is authoritative, so synchronisation resolves rather than duplicates.
Resilient message flows
Retries, ordering guarantees and dead-letter queues so a provider outage does not silently drop commercial records.
Reconciliation
Scheduled comparison of records across systems, with discrepancies reported and attributed rather than discovered at month end.
Contract management
Versioned API contracts with documentation, so a change on one side is a planned release, not an outage.
Typical integrations
- CRM platforms
- ERP and finance systems
- Ecommerce and marketplace APIs
- Payment gateways and banks
- Warehouse and fulfilment systems
- Logistics and carrier services
- HR and payroll systems
- Analytics and data warehouses
Delivery
How the engagement runs.
Every engagement is phased so something usable exists early, and cost and scope stay visible.
- 01
Estate mapping
Inventory of systems, interfaces and the data each holds, plus the commercial processes that depend on them.
- 02
Contract and ownership design
The canonical model, which system owns which field, and the direction of every flow.
- 03
Build and test
Interfaces built against sandbox environments, with failure cases and volume tested before go-live.
- 04
Monitor and operate
Alerting, retry handling, reconciliation reporting and documentation for whoever operates the estate.
Business benefits
What changes commercially.
Removal of manual reconciliation
Records move between systems without re-keying, which removes both the effort and the errors it produces.
Faster operational cycles
Orders, stock and invoices available where they are needed immediately rather than at the next manual update.
Lower change cost
A documented integration layer means replacing or adding a system is a contained piece of work.
Visibility when something breaks
Failures are logged, alerted and reconcilable, rather than discovered by a customer or a month-end gap.
Industry examples
What this looks like in practice.
Representative scenarios rather than published client engagements.
Commerce to ERP to finance
Orders flow from storefront to fulfilment and accounting, with stock, pricing and invoice status synchronised in both directions.
CRM and operations platform
Customer, quote and service records shared between a custom operational system and a CRM, with one agreed owner per field.
Partner and marketplace connectivity
A business exposing inventory and pricing to channel partners through an API with entitlements, rate limits and usage reporting.
Questions
Frequently asked.
Scope is driven by the number of systems, the quality of their APIs, the data model work and the failure handling required. A single well-documented interface is a contained piece of work; a multi-system estate with reconciliation and legacy systems is substantially more. We price after mapping the interfaces involved.
There are usually alternatives: database-level integration, scheduled file exchange, a partner-side adapter, or an approved vendor extension. We assess which option is supportable before recommending it, because unsupported workarounds become the failure point later.
It depends on the commercial consequence of delay. Stock availability or payment status usually needs near real-time; analytics and reporting rarely do. Designing everything as real-time adds cost and fragility for no gain.
Yes. We frequently define the architecture and contract, then work alongside internal teams, or hand over documented interfaces for them to maintain.
Queues, retries with backoff, dead-letter handling and reconciliation reporting, so records are recovered rather than lost, and the business can see what was affected.
Next step
Discuss your integration requirements
Tell us which systems need to talk to each other and what currently goes wrong between them. We will respond with an integration approach and where we would start.